Earlier this month I shared a piece about how bloggers are impacting digital marketing strategies and what executives need to know. This piece will help you understand how to best work with bloggers in order to reap the benefits.

Most of us remember the days when journalists held the key to a company’s earned publicity. Companies hired PR personnel to cultivate positive relationships with journalists and land placements in newspapers, magazines, or even on TV.

Today that landscape has changed. Instead of utilizing press releases and traditional media relationships, companies now need to build strong ties to influential bloggers and digital influencers. Why? Because like we mentioned in Part 1, they can control your brand’s reputation, influence purchase behavior, impact your SEO, drive traffic to your website, and are the gatekeepers to your
audience.

So to build strong relationships with these online influencers, follow these 10 steps:

1. Know Your Audience

Most companies already have this down as this data is usually found within the business and marketing plans. But for this purpose, make sure you understand the age, gender, location, interests, hobbies, and desires of your audience. These are the people you want to target through the bloggers. So when identifying which bloggers you want to work with, also consider who their audience is. Some bloggers will even give you a media kit with their readership’s demographic data, usually from
Google Analytics. So don't be afraid to ask!

2. Know Your Offering

Determine what it is that you want to offer the blogger in exchange for them to do a blog post on your company or share information on their social channels. Ideally it should be incredibly compelling content such as giving them a great interview, an interesting infographic, or an entertaining video. You could also provide them with a sample of your product or service, a giveaway that they can share with their readers, or even just monetary compensation. Of course the last is a “no no” with journalists, but many serious bloggers will require payment for the post, as they consider blogging their job. Sometimes you may have to offer a mix of the above.

3. Audit Your Current Blogger Relationships

Do you have any current blogger relationships? If so, make sure to maintain friendly contact with them on a regular basis even if just to say “hello!” If you have good relationships, feel free to ask them what they want to hear about from your company and what would make a compelling blog post. Also ask them to recommend other blogger friends that might be interested in learning about your brand.

I’ll be honest, blogger outreach is time intensive. Especially if you are manually researching and building lists of the bloggers you are going to contact. It’s worth investing in a tool such as GroupHigh, Cision, InkyBee, BuzzStream or others that can help you find relevant bloggers. Once you’ve found your tool, spend some time developing great lists. For example, if you’re selling blenders, you might want to develop lists of the following types of bloggers: Nutrition, Fitness, Lifestyle, Moms, Dads, Foodies, etc.

5. Learn What Bloggers Want

Research the bloggers before you reach out to them and get an idea of their specific interests, needs, goals, and life circumstances. When it comes time to contact them, tailor and personalize your pitch so they know you did your research and are genuinely interested in working with them. Also, be sure to also always address them by name. Be professional and personable.